The Web's

Best Stuff

for Med Students*

*Pre-meds, Interns and Residents,
you're welcome too

Kevin Wang, "Almost" MD

Kevin Wang is a quality and safety fellow at NYP-Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York. He completed his his BA in Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and is currently applying to medical school. He is also an aspiring entrepreneur and consultant at the Nyes Institute. Follow him @kvnwang.

Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to use Google Glass for 24 hours. It was an amazing opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. For the past year now, Google Glass has been a buzz word and tool amongst the technology community. Google Glass is a wearable computer with a small transparent prism on the right side that can display information and notifications. It also features a touchpad on the side to navigate various screens to check email, directions, the next subway, or headlines from The New York Times. It also features a high resolution camera and microphone to take photos and videos which can be shared on Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. Though it can take videos and pictures alone, many of its features require that you use Bluetooth to connect it to your smartphone for data. The device itself is quite elegant. Along with its sleek packaging, many of the nurses and physician assistants at the hospital thought they were an Apple product when they tried them on. The hardware is encased in soft-touch plastic which includes the battery as a counterweight. There’s a thin titanium strip that creates the arc of the glasses along with a nose pad which allow the device to rest on your face. If you’ve ever worn metal framed glasses, it will fit right at home, if a little off center due to...

Berg, the company the brought along fun internet-connected concepts and products such as the Little Printer released this interesting video recently. The amazing part of this is that Cloudwash is foundational and will just be built on. It shows where the current state of the Internet of Things is and where it can go in the future. What Berg did was amazing to me. It took a regular “dumb” appliance with software and electronics that were trapped in and made the interaction richer and its meaning and value richer. In a way, they radically changed the way I viewed how devices could be connected and created the possibility for a new class of devices in our daily lives. And in a way, I saw so many parallels to healthcare. In the video, Berg mentioned how the action of washing clothes can be quite complicated. There are baroque symbols on how clothes should be treated and this in turn is reflected by different sets of complicated icons on machines. Healthcare delivery can be far more complex though. “In any given hospital, as many as 15 medical devices, including monitors, ventilators and infusion pumps, are connected to an ICU patient, but because they are made by different companies, they don’t “talk” with one another. Patient-controlled analgesic pumps that deliver powerful narcotics, where a known side effect is respiratory depression, aren’t linked...